Saturday, May 19, 2018

A postscript: The Sexual Inequality Party

Andrea Constand, Cosby's accuser, who is not mentioned by the WSWS

By Frank Brenner

I think maybe it’s time
for the Socialist Equality Party to consider a name change - to the Sexual
Inequality Party. I already examined their willful blindness to sexual abuse in
a previous post. [1]
Here I just want to add a postscript on their reaction to the guilty verdict in
the Bill Cosby case. [2] I don’t think it’s over
the top to characterize this article as obscene - for its complete indifference
to Cosby’s victims. There isn’t a word of sympathy for them anywhere in the
article. Even the name of Cosby’s accuser in the case, Andrea Constand, is
never once mentioned.

As I noted in my post,
the sympathy of WSWS writers is typically for powerful men who stand accused of
sexual abuse. So, in Cosby’s case, we are told, the judge’s decision in the
second trial to allow five other women to testify about their abuse by Cosby
constituted “moving the goal posts” legally so as to secure a conviction. Which
amounts to saying that Cosby is the victim of a judicial frame-up.

In the first trial, only
one other woman besides Constand was allowed to testify (though others wanted
to). There are as many as 60 women who claim Cosby abused them but only
Constand’s case was still within the statute of limitations. But just because
the legal expiry date had passed for these other women doesn’t mean that Cosby
didn’t abuse them. In fact, there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence
that confirms their stories, including non-disclosure agreements and hush money
paid to some of these women by Cosby as well as grand jury testimony in which
Cosby admitted to repeatedly drugging his victims. It could be argued with a
lot more justification that the first trial, where all but one of these women
were shut out from the proceedings, amounted to “moving the goal posts” in
Cosby’s favor.

A constant theme of the
WSWS coverage of cases like this is the need to defend due process and the
presumption of innocence. These are indeed important legal democratic rights
that need to be defended (though as I’ll get to shortly, the WSWS has a huge
blind spot about another democratic right). But the Cosby case had way more due
process than 99 percent of people ever get who are caught up in the justice
system. He had the best legal minds and courtroom strategies money could buy
and he was given two full-scale trials. If this isn’t due process, then the
term has no meaning. But reading the WSWS the impression you get is that it is
Cosby who is the victim, not his accusers. It would seem that even when due
process leads to a sexual abuser’s conviction, this is still not enough for the
WSWS. So maybe something else is going on here, maybe what they really want is
to make sexual abuse vanish as a public concern.

The same article
misrepresents a NY Times op-ed by law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer. Tuerkheimer
was arguing that the Cosby case might mark a turning point. She writes:

“#MeToo
can best be understood as a needed corrective to a longstanding reality: Women
who report sexual violations by people they know, including mentors,
co-workers, bosses, classmates, acquaintances, friends and intimates, are often
not believed.” [3]

One
study she cites found that half of police detectives believe most of the sexual
assault accusations brought to them are false, whereas the actual number of
false accusations are typically in the order of five percent. It’s impossible
to imagine any other category of crime - murder, robbery, simple assault -
where such a situation prevails. It is this “credibility discounting” - not
only among police but also among district attorneys, judges, juries etc. - that
is a major reason for why sexual assault remains a vastly underreported crime.

To
make its case the WSWS journalist, Tom Carter, deliberately misrepresents what
Tuerkheimer writes. Carter states,

Tuerkheimer’s article, titled
“The Cosby Jury Finally Believes the Women,” testifies to the erosion of
democratic consciousness among substantial sections of middle-class academics
influenced by identity politics. Her line of argumentation inevitably
undermines the defendant’s right to the presumption of innocence. Moreover, the
entire approach runs counter to essential democratic legal conceptions
governing a criminal prosecution. The
issue confronting a jury is not whether it should, as a general principle,
believe women rather than men, or vice versa. [Our emphasis]

Carter’s
claim, that Tuerkheimer is saying that women are always to be believed and that
this is an attack on the presumption of innocence, is a complete distortion of
what Tuerkheimer is saying. Rather Tuerkheimer
is pointing to a longstanding prejudiceagainst believingthe accusations of women in sexual
abuse cases. She is arguing for the elimination of that prejudice.That
is completely different than arguing for the replacement of that prejudice with
another prejudice, namely to always believe the accusations of women. In
her conclusion she writes:

“Jurors do not come to a case against Mr.
Cosby, or any other defendant, as blank slates. Instead, provided they have not
prejudged the facts, jurors evaluate the evidence admitted at trial fairly,
applying common sense and their general understandings of how the world
operates. In the past, this important work was routinely infected by
misconceptions about sexual assault, resulting in the vast underestimation of
survivors’ credibility. #MeToo is only beginning to remedy that profound
distortion.”

It is
because of that profound distortion - rooted in misogyny - that the justice
system is an INjustice system for a huge number of women who are victims of
sexual assault.

But
the WSWS is indifferent to any of this. Specifically, they are blind to a
democratic right that is just as consequential as due process - the right to
consent. As soon as you take that right seriously, then it becomes evident that
there are significant limitations to due process. Sexual assault almost always ends up in court as he-said/she-said cases, which
is to say cases where there is no independent corroborating evidence such as a
witness. Even if the she-said is more believable than the he-said, it's
extremely difficult for that on its own to rise to the level of 'beyond a
reasonable doubt' required for a conviction. And as Tuerkheimer notes, that
difficulty is hugely compounded by the system’s built-in misogyny.

As far as the WSWS is
concerned, this is no problem so long as the rules of due process have been
observed. But this is the standpoint of a legal pedant, not a Marxist
revolutionary. Here we have a category of crimes where a great many women (and
some men) are being abused, often scarred for life, and yet few perpetrators
are ever brought to justice. It is to #MeToo’s credit that it has focused a lot
of public attention on this grave injustice. But here Marxists would part
company with liberals like Tuerkheimer in insisting that within the constraints
of bourgeois legality it is never going to be possible to fully reconcile due
process and the right to consent (a subject for a possible future post). That
being said, whatever advances can be made for justice for women within
bourgeois constraints should be supported. In that respect, Marxists can never
be members of a Sexual Inequality Party.

16 comments:

Thank you! This is what I've been trying to say for months in the wsws comments for months. This was a totally missed opportunity for the SEP to get on the right side of history, but I'm not sure what I expected giving their past positions. I have no idea why they've chosen to support elite men over the allegations of working class women and men. And once they had some of the due process they've been screaming for, they denounce the whole system as corrupt. My mind is boggled. Again, thank you!

And thanks for your comment Stephany. A good question indeed - why is the SEP so insistent on coming to the defense of powerful men? And why is it so blind to the scope of sexual abuse? One thing is certain though - their position has nothing to do with Marxism.

Once again this shows the WSWS departure from a dialectical understanding of social development. No attempt to understand the change in sexual relations from a Marxist point of view. The same applies to trade unions where they refuse to see the conflict between the rank and file and the trade union bureaucracy, lumping them together as a reactionary block. The same goes for their complete lack of understanding of democratic centralism.

The Elephant in the room here Steiner is that all your knit picking in the scheme of things really adds up to diddly squat . Before you anoint yourself 'Mr Dialectic par excellence ', there is another facet of the dialectic which you seem to be completely ignorant of . That the real world abhors a vacuum and so by definition you are either adding to the struggle of one class or you adding to the interests of the other.

Your caveat that you think is wholly sufficient, in that you are not trying to be a daily online paper taking up the daily struggles of the working class, nor attempting to build a revolutionary leadership, is merely a play on words my friend . In objective terms and this is an indisputable fact , you are creating confusion within the class struggle , and providing no leadership as to a way out.

So when push comes to shove, where (in another play on words), are you not a nark or a troll within the workers movement ??

PS this page has been screen shot by the way just in case you seek to airbrush this comment out of the conversation as if it doesn't exist.

Who and what I am is self evident . Any other specific is an irrelevance . i made a reply to your posting and so you answer me as to what 'I ''must' be refering to '' ? . After all you're the dialectical genius . If i can make a logical association to your words , then surely you can as well to mine ?

Thats a complete cop out Steiner . Since when does a troll offer you a reasoned argument ? . All you are doing is trying to control the question, for in there lies the control of the answer. All you are doing is playing the lawyer. Face it Steiner you are on the edge of a contradiction you cannot get off , so all you are doing is trying to circumvent it with ( contrary to mine ) an unqualified ad hominem as if it constitutes an argument. After all you are not stupid... just desperate.

That was the Progressive Labor mantra in the Sixties. In other words, shut the fuck up and keep selling the paper.

It's an argument meant to avoid dealing with any real issues that we are raising. Those issues require something called thinking. Remember that? That's what you are arguing against.

And if your criteria is going to be "Why haven't you built a movement, or why don't you have a daily paper"? then it is only fair that I ask that question of you. Those are your criteria, not mine. But you are not willing to answer.

' shut the fuck up and keep selling the paper.'' is an amorphous statement that means everything and nothing. What you do is to throw up paper tigers as if they are consequential in the greater scheme of things . You are just constantly examining your navel and everyone elses in relation to some idealised form you have of what a revolutionary party should look like .

In relation to time and events i don't think you see how obsolete and irrelevant you have become. You're an echo in the wilderness attempting make something yet with no concrete practise of your own to give it a form in reality. The real world has moved on . it has chewed you up and spat you out , and all you can do is create an illusion of your worth by knocking the one party that is actually going somewhere.

The SEP is now leading and collaborating with other sections and groups in relation to vital present day issues that confront the working class and even your hallowed middle class . It does so however with an identity grounded in struggle and confirmed by events . You are nowhere going nowhere, yet you persist in sabotaging the party that is . Your objective reality ''is'' the troll , the ''nark''.

I think we have heard enough from you. Your sophmoric name calling shows that we cannot expect anything resembling reasoned discussion from you.

There was once a very vulgar argument that went something like this:

"We are a successful party. We have hundreds of thousands of followers and our international comrades in the Soviet Union command the largest country in the world and have one of the most powerful armies. You cannot argue with that kind of success."

When that argument was voiced by the Stalinists it carried a lot of weight with many people who were drawn toward the powerful and successful. By comparison the arguments of the tiny groups supporting Trotsky did not get much of a hearing even though Trotsky was 100% right.

Only a vulgar opportunist would argue this way but the argument still had some resonance as long as the Soviet Union existed.

To repeat such arguments today while pointing to the "success" of the SEP is a good example of self-delusion.

Have you read today's entry in this continuing saga of All Sex Scandals* Are Political Scandals? While an interesting history involving Charlie Chaplain, it swerves into delusion by the implicit comparison with Weinstein. It of course continues to ignore the fact that the vast majority of posters of #metoo-tagged experiences are in the working class. The success brought to Jessica Chastain by association, apparently, wipes out the millions of incidents exposed by working women (and some men) during this wave of communication.

You write, "Specifically, they [the WSWS] are blind to a democratic right that is just as consequential as due process - the right to consent. As soon as you take that right seriously, then it becomes evident that there are significant limitations to due process. Sexual assault almost always ends up in court as he-said/she-said cases, which is to say cases where there is no independent corroborating evidence such as a witness."

Even ignoring the larger political limitations of the MeToo movement, you are arguing that the guilt of the accused can and should be determined using standards that fall far short of a reasonable doubt. In other words, if due process cannot determine the guilt of the accused, then other methods should be employed. This is the language of fascism and not of Marxism.

Despite your Marxist pretensions, you've fallen--and likely quite willingly fallen--into a trap set for you by the capitalist state and its defenders in the Democratic Party and mainstream media.

Terrified that emerging mass opposition to Trump could become a broader mobilization against the Capitalist state as a whole, this emerging sentiment had to be diverted into reactionary channels. Noone wants to see women abused by powerful men after all. The thinking was, 'distract the people from a fight for their basic class interests and try to convince them the stinking corpse of imperialism still has some progressive fight left in it. Let a few isolated women get wealthy as a result and bring some left wing saps on board in hopes that they might get some of the spoils too.'

As far as your criticism of the WSWS's analysis of the Cosby verdict is concerned, you are extraordinarily duplicitous. Here's what the site actually wrote,

"Substantial evidence to support a verdict of guilty was presented at the trial. At the same time, the manner in which the trial was conducted raises serious legal questions that will doubtless be the subject of a lengthy appeal process.

However, it is necessary at the outset to distinguish between the question of Cosby’s individual guilt and the anti-democratic campaign that is being waged in the media around his conviction."

You suggest that somehow this provides sympathy for Cosby. Anyone with basic English reading skills and without a hidden political agenda would argue that it does not.

One final note. Although the WSWS is not in a position to definitively determine the guilt or innocence of any of the accused (for that matter, neither are you, notwithstanding your reliance on the fantastic power of subjective idealism as a basis for political analysis), it rightly recognized that it was the duty of the working class and the revolutionary party to defend democratic rights now matter which class was affected. After all, the methods being used against the wealthy will be turned against the working class too and with far greater scope and viciousness. Although you're well past the point of taking anything Lenin said seriously, I would still advise your readers to take heed of the following:

"Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected — unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population."

The gutter politics of David North

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) edition of May 17 featured a hysterical diatribe against me by the leader of that organization, David North.

Here we are today, 33 years after the split with Healy. Does the fact that North was on the right side of that split confer upon him the legitimacy of a hereditary monarch? Reading North’s comments, one would think that for him the Fourth International is some kind of franchise that he alone can operate. If the continuity of the Fourth International is to have any meaning, other than a ritualistic invocation meant to shore up the flagging morale of one’s followers, it can only be in one’s adherence to the program and theoretical conceptions of the Fourth International. If we examine the political conceptions and organizational practices of the group North has led for all these years it is clear that in all respects it bears little resemblance to the organization Trotsky founded in 1938. It is in fact our exposure of the hollowness of North’s claims to be the inheritor of the mantle of Trotsky that has so infuriated him. Why else would he be spending more time writing about me and Frank Brenner, two individuals, than about the Stalinists, Pabloites and state capitalists?

Trump and the crisis of liberalism

by Frank Brenner

It is tempting to say that 2016 marks the death of liberalism, but that's probably wishful thinking. What is dead, though, is the old 'centrist' political consensus, i.e. the pendulum swings from centre-left to centre-right that made mainstream politics in the West about as predictable (and stable) as an old grandfather clock. Now the swings are much more extreme - or rather the swings to the right are. (One might add that what led up to this was a major shift rightward of the 'center' itself from Reagan/Thatcher on – what Tariq Ali rightly dubbed the “extreme center”.

Lecture: Dialectics of Revolutionary Strategy and Tactics

Alex Steiner gave a talk at the Locomotiva Cooperative Cafe in Athens, Greece on July 9, 2015, shortly after the historic vote for NO - OXI -in the Referendum of July 5. The event was a huge success attracting a packed audience of about 50 people. The talk was sponsored by the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK) and was chaired by Savas Michael-Matsas. A Greek translation of this talk is now available. The translation was first published in the theoretical journal of the EEK, Revolutionary Marxist Review, in the issue of November 2015-February 2016. The translation was the work of Eve Manopoulou.

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